Jewniversehttp://thejewniverse.com
the inspirational, the extraordinary, and the just plain strangeSun, 02 Aug 2015 09:38:07 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3If “The Wire” Were Israeli, It Would Be This Showhttp://thejewniverse.com/2015/if-the-wire-were-israeli-it-would-be-this-show/
http://thejewniverse.com/2015/if-the-wire-were-israeli-it-would-be-this-show/#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 16:30:44 +0000http://thejewniverse.com/2015/if-the-wire-were-israeli-it-would-be-this-show/
Fauda, a new thriller on Israeli TV, is being likened to American crime drama “The Wire,” and not just for its frequent shoot-outs and edge-of-your-seat pacing; like its American cousin, the show is enjoying critical acclaim, and a broad, faithful fan-base.

Created by Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff and writer, actor, and former undercover counter-terroristLior Raaz, the show follows an Israeli army unit and the Hamas militants the unit is tracking down. “Fauda” is Arabic for “chaos,” and the show more than lives up to its title—it’s an honest portrayal of the complexity and disorder at the heart of the Israel/Palestine conflict. There’s no clear “good guy”; often, characters in the Hamas camp are portrayed with remarkable sympathy.

Issacharoff assumed such divisive subject matter would turn people away, but it’s done just the opposite—audiences on both sides of the conflict revel in the show’s fresh attempts at objectivism. Speaking with The Times of Israel, Issacharoff voiced surprise that “[Israelis] cared so much about [Hamas members] Walid and Abu Ahmed.”

Fauda has recently been renewed for a second season. As yet, there’s no way to watch the show with English subtitles, but stay tuned to our Facebook and we’ll be sure to let you know when there is. In the meantime, you can watch this subtitled promo.

On the eve of the Holocaust the Jewish population of Bulgaria was 48,000. At the end: 48,000. This isn’t a Holocaust tale like you’ve heard before.

In late 1940, like most other European countries, a pro-Germany Bulgarian government passed Bulgaria’s first anti-Jewish laws. But unlike those countries, what followed were mass protests from a largely non-Jewish public. After hundreds of years of peaceful co-existence with Jews, the Bulgarian public were not buying what Hitler was selling.

But public outcry wasn’t enough. The Jews needed Dimitar Pešev, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly and longstanding friend of the Jewish community. By 1943, aware of the gruesome fates of Jews deported from Bulgarian-occupied territories like Thrace, Greece, Pešev persuaded Tsar Boris to delay deportations. Following that, Pešev introduced legislation in the parliament critical of the deportations. Though the legislation was voted down and Pešev forced to resign, the subsequent waves of public protest, featuring the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, changed Boris’ mind. Plans of deportation were nixed.

It wasn’t until the Cold War ended that this incredible story came to light. Previously censored by a Soviet regime that could not give credit where credit was due—the Church, the King, enemies of communism alike—Pešev’s heroism remained buried but not forgotten.

(Image courtesy Ghetto Fighters House Museum)

]]>http://thejewniverse.com/2015/how-bulgaria-stood-up-to-the-nazis-and-saved-its-jews/feed/0Sammy Davis, Jr. Sings “Fiddler”http://thejewniverse.com/2015/sammy-davis-jr-sings-fiddler/
http://thejewniverse.com/2015/sammy-davis-jr-sings-fiddler/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 15:30:36 +0000http://thejewniverse.com/?p=10684
Sammy Davis, Jr., the singer, tap-dancer, and entertainer, converted to Judaism in 1961, at the age of 36. He was passionate about his adopted religion, and remained so his entire life.

Nevertheless, he always had a sense of humor about his conversion, too. While hosting the Academy Awards in 1971, he told the crowd, “Tonight, the Academy honors both my peoples–with Fiddler on the Roofand Shaft.” It wasn’t just empty boasting–Davis has also performed, in full shtetl drag, the song “If I Was a Rich Man.”

It wasn’t Davis Jr.’s first musical theatre role, nor was it his first collaboration with Fiddler–he and Fiddler composer Jerry Bock worked together on the Broadway revue Catch a Star, and Bock later wrote music for Davis’ revue Mr. Wonderful.

In his 1965 autobiography Yes I Can, Davis devotes several meaty chapters to talking about the philosophical role of Judaism in his life. And as much as his religion inspired him, it also caused him even more tzuris than he’d already encountered: he was fond of telling how, once, he took a public bus in the South and was told that Black people had to sit in the back. “But I’m Jewish,” he told the driver, who replied: “Then get off!”

]]>http://thejewniverse.com/2015/sammy-davis-jr-sings-fiddler/feed/0The Jewish Boy Who Shot the German Diplomathttp://thejewniverse.com/2015/the-jewish-boy-who-shot-the-german-diplomat/
http://thejewniverse.com/2015/the-jewish-boy-who-shot-the-german-diplomat/#commentsTue, 28 Jul 2015 15:30:05 +0000http://thejewniverse.com/?p=10672
Herschel Grynszpan was­­­n’t yet eighteen when, on November 7, 1938, he took 300 francs from his impoverished uncle, bought a revolver, marched into the German embassy in Paris, and shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath five times in the abdomen.

But this was no random act of violence. Grynszpan, shy but fiercely emotional, was born in Poland, the son of a tailor. Hoping for a better life, his family had relocated to Hanover, where they remained until, in August 1938, German authorities cancelled residence permits for foreigners. The Grynszpans, along with 12,000 other Polish Jews, were deported to Poland, only to be denied entry due to a recent edict cancelling Polish citizenship for expat Jews.

Immediately after Vom Rath was killed, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels declared: It would not be surprising if the German people were so outraged at this attack by “the forces of international Jewry” that they took the law into their own hands and attacked Jewish businesses.

It’s said that the members of a hevra kaddisha, or a Jewish burial society, perform the “ultimate kindness” — that is, helping another person who’ll never be able to repay the favor.

Usually, members are volunteers who perform that “kindness” on strangers. But, in the short story “The Chevra” by Goldie Goldbloom, a young woman volunteers to travel across the world, to Australia, to perform the service on someone who she knew better than anyone else: her mother.

The narrator is unflinching in her description of the account: “The dead make sounds. They don’t mean to,” she writes. “But the processes of the body do not need a brain to tell them what to do.” Death, as Goldbloom depicts it, is a whirlpool of different life stories about life: about her mother’s known secrets (the tattoo on her arm) and the ones less known (her mother’s true love, and her brother’s semi-hermit status in the Australian bush), and the narrator’s own journey across the world, to the place she knows best. This one is a real don’t-miss.

Rickets, a vitamin D deficiency disease that causes children’s bones to soften, was so common in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that doctors were at a loss for explaining its prevalence. Children with the characteristic bowed legs and stunted growth were raised in wealthy and poor families alike. However, doctors noted a curious exception to this rule: Jewish children seemed immune from the disease.

William Hall, a physician in Leeds, noted in 1902 that half of the poor schoolchildren in his city had rickets, while only 7% of Jewish children showed signs of the disease. In 1902, chemists hadn’t yet discovered vitamins, and there were numerous conflicting theories about what caused rickets.

One theory was that dietary fat protected children, so Hall argued that the eggs, milk, and copious fried potatoes and herring ate by the Jews of Leeds made their children taller and stronger than their classmates. The pickled herring and kugels of traditional Ashkenazi cuisine may be derided as fatty gut-bombs in 2015, but your great (great) grandmother must have known that her children needed fat, and plenty of it, to stand tall.

What did the saddest day of the year look like in India? For the Bene Israel community, as for Jews around the world, Tisha B’Av marks the end of three weeks of avoiding pleasures like meat, music, and dancing. But this cluster of Indian Jews also broke the twenty-four hour fast with a commemorative bowl of sprouted beans, or val, to remember the manna-like presentation of val to shipwreck survivors — ancestors — in the second century BCE.

So important was this humble reminder of survival that the Bene Israel even named the holiday after it, in Marathi and Urdu: Birda Cha Roza, or Sprouted Beans of the Fast. (Until British colonist John Wilson encountered the Bene Israel, they did not identify with the rest of world Jewry. Thus does their name for the saddest day of the Jewish year ring with the languages of their Muslim and Hindu neighbors).

In modern times, the eating of birda after Tisha B’av transformed into sprouted beans, egg curry and rice eaten seated on the floor, a “mourner’s meal.” But this meal also perhaps contains the foods that remind us of roundness, the shape that appeals to our ideas about the shape of the year: it goes, and returns to where it started.

On these hottest days of summer – especially when parts of our country are rationing water – we should thank late Israeli engineer Simcha Blass for helping farmers figure out how to best harness the water they do have.

Blass revolutionized drip irrigation in the early 1930’s, pretty haphazardly. As the story goes, Blass saw a big tree growing seemingly without water. When he dug into the soil, he found an onion-shaped pocket of underground water feeding the tree’s roots. Each drop of water was being stored and sucked out as needed.

Blass made tubing that would release water slowly and steadily through larger and longer passageways, using friction to keep the flow. Blass refined this method and patented his surface drip irrigation emitter. In 1965, Kibbutz Hatzerim used Blass’s creation to create a new irrigation development industry, called Netafim, Hebrew for “droplets.”

Today, with Blass as inspiration, Israel continues to lead the way in drip and micro-irrigation inventions. These new products help farmers all over the world, no matter how arid the soil or how slow the water pressure.

It’s also a great lesson in human ingenuity and patience. Each water drop (and every kind action) makes a difference in the life and growth of our world.

Gone are the days, it seems, when one could get recruited for espionage at a cocktail party. (Or maybe we’re just going to the wrong parties.) But that’s what happened to Yolande Harmer, an Egyptian Jewish spy for the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli Defense Forces, whose intelligence became instrumental to the founding of Israel. A new film directed by Dan Wolman and produced by Harmer’s granddaughter Miel de Botton, Yolande: An Unsung Heroine, tells the story of her extraordinary, often dangerous life.

Born in Alexandria in 1913, she had already had two children (trivia: she’s philosopher Alain de Botton’s grandmother) and been married and divorced when she was recruited by Moshe Sharett of the Jewish Agency in 1945. She went undercover as a journalist covering Egyptian politics — facilitated by her part-time reporting work — in order to get classified information, such as the Arab League resolutions, into the hands of Haganah leaders. Harmer is sometimes known as the “Jewish Mata Hari,” but in Yolande, Miel disputes this easy comparison — Harmer had good relations with both sides, but was no double agent.

After ‘48, her genteel manners and dovish beliefs, which included supporting the coexistence of Arabs and Jews, left her somewhat adrift in the new state. When she was finally outed by the Muslim Brotherhood and arrested, Harmer’s glory days were over. But we might try living occasionally inspired by what could have been her motto: “unsafety first.”

]]>http://thejewniverse.com/2015/the-egyptian-woman-who-spied-for-israel/feed/0Partying After Ramadan, on the Mediterraneanhttp://thejewniverse.com/2015/partying-after-ramadan-on-the-mediterranean/
http://thejewniverse.com/2015/partying-after-ramadan-on-the-mediterranean/#commentsMon, 20 Jul 2015 15:30:15 +0000http://thejewniverse.com/?p=10626Looking for a summer trip that’s a little more mind-opening than beach volleyball?

Last Friday marked the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. For the past decade or so, tour guides in Israel, both Arab and Jewish, have been offering special packages where people from all regions and religions can experience the traditional Eid al-Fitr feasts and festivities. Tours can include walking around Jerusalem, buying holiday treats, joining a local family for the iftar, the break-fast meal, or hearing the muezzin announce the end of the daily fast. According to this article, 2015 was a particularly popularly year for them.

Last year, Ramadan fell during Israel’s Protective Edge operation in Gaza, which was an extremely tense time for Jewish-Arab relations. This year, the relative calm has made Ramadan Tours a festive way for Israeli Jews and tourists to experience a part of Israel many do not see. The tours are particularly popular among Israeli Jews, who want to learn more about Israeli Arabs – and of course taste the delicious barazek (pistachio-sesame cookies) often served at iftar.

Whether it’s the cookies or the conversation, Ramadan Tours are a hopeful sign for peaceful coexistence. And there’s volleyball nearby if you really want that too.

Coney Island is famous for its seashores, sideshows, and salty breezes. But, of course, it’s also famous for its hot dogs—Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, that is. You may know it as the site of the similarly famous gut-clogging hot-dog eating contest.

Just in time for the iconic Brooklyn hot-doggery’s centennial is Famous Nathan, a new documentary by Lloyd Handwerker, grandson of Nathan Handwerker—yes, that Nathan.

Lloyd began interviewing family members and former employees of the store over thirty years ago, amassing 300 hours of material. The film (trailer here) is a joy to watch, a blend of animation, archival footage, home movies, and even audio recordings of Nathan himself, a Polish immigrant who arrived in New York in 1912 with no money and no English.

It’s no wonder the film won the Audience Award at the 2015 Jewish Film Festival in Berlin. That it won the Best Documentary Feature at the Coney Island Film Festival seems like a given. The old footage is a delight to watch: a fast-food pundit interviewed for the film suggested that the early years of Nathan’s may have been something like a combination of a cronut line and a Babylonian orgy.

Just remember to wait a while before riding the infamous Cyclone roller coaster. Or maybe just avoid it altogether.

P.S. Famous Nathan is screening in NYC July 17-23! Find info on that and other screenings here.

She already won two Emmy® awards. She’s a world-renowned comedian, performer, writer, and mom, offering up her uncensored opinions on motherhood, Judaism, and gender equality. She used to co-host The View, just finished an off-Broadway run as Eleanor Roosevelt, and The New York Times called her one-woman show “fiercely funny, honest and moving.”

Still, Judy Gold is pissed off. And you can hear her rant all about it in her hilarious new weekly podcast, Kill Me Now. She’s covered:

Nothing is too sacred or profane for Judy to find the humor in it. And she interviews celebrity guests who are insanely funny and angry too – like writer/comedian Frank Conniff, comic actor Rachel Feinstein, and TV icon Rosie O’Donnell.

This podcast is more than just a communal diatribe though. Gold and her guests are loud and vulnerable, angry and honest. Gold is especially brilliant because she says the ugly truths we’re all thinking.

Warning: You will laugh your nose off. Also, you will feel very differently about catfish, Hebrew, and the Duggars after listening.